A great piece of design or illustration can be taken to new heights with screen print. The texture and variance of the ink on the paper is beautiful, and the ‘happy mistakes’ are delicious. But this magic is not possible without prepping your artwork.
How to Prepare Artwork for Screen Print in Omaha
Shapes & Sizes
First and foremost, submitting Vector art is always best. What makes vector art special is that everything is defined by shapes, as opposed to raster art’s pixels. This means the image never degrades at any size. A vector art image could be used for an inside tag, an all over screen print or a billboard without any pixelation or loss of quality. Vector images are very simple to change color, scale, orientation, etc. Also, vector images don’t need separations or the fees that go along with them, unless they are very very complex in color. If you need help creating vector art work, give us a call and Omaha Shirts can help.
Bigger
To print your images cleanly we need raster art that is created with at least 150 DPI at size. That is, if you’d like your raster logo to print 10” wide, the image must have been created at 10”w with 150dpi or more and not scaled up from a lower res file. Having some resolution to spare gives you flexibility with print size.
Font
Text, when created in Photoshop or Illustrator, remains tied to the specific font associated with it on your system unless it is either rasterized (Photoshop) or expanded (illustrator). If we receive a file that contains unconverted text and we do not have that font, our systems will automatically replace it. Nobody wants to see Comic Sans when they wanted Trajan Pro.
File Types
The simplest file types to work with are vector files which are .ai, .pdf, .eps and raster images which files ending with .psd, .jpg, .tff, etc. Keep in mind it is entirely possible that a .ai file could contain raster art and that a .psd file could contain vector art.
Terrain
One often overlooked detail is the fact that the art being printed stays the same size, while the garment size changes. For example, if you want a design that goes around the collar, the collar is going to be a different size between a small shirt and a 2x and the art would need to accommodate that for screen print.
Conclusion on Screen Print
The more specific you are with your needs, the better we can accomplish them. We want you to get what you want, but we won’t know unless you tell us. If you are still struggling, please feel free to give us a call or stop by our store inside Westroads Mall.
